1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to screen fonts for a computer or other electronic screen, display, or monitor, and particularly to a method of generating a transliteration font that is capable of displaying a word that has at least one character in an alphabet of a first language in a transliteration font that includes at least one embedded character representing a phonetic pronunciation of the word in the alphabet of a second language.
2. Description of the Related Art
Transliteration is the practice of converting a text from one writing system into another in a systematic way. From an information-theoretical point of view, transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word-by-word, or ideally letter-by-letter. Transliteration attempts to use a one-to-one correspondence and be exact, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. To achieve this objective, transliteration may define complex conventions for dealing with letters in a source script, which do not correspond with letters in a goal script.
Transliteration is opposed to transcription, which specifically maps the sounds of one language to the best matching script of another language. Still, most systems of transliteration map the letters of the source script to letters pronounced similarly in the goal script for some specific pair of source and goal language. If the relations between letters and sounds are similar in both languages, a transliteration may be (almost) the same as a transcription. In practice, there are also some mixed transliteration/transcription systems that transliterate a part of the original script and transcribe the rest.
Transcription, in the linguistic sense, is the conversion of a representation of language into another representation of language, usually in the same language but in a different form. Transcription should not be confused with translation, which, in linguistics, usually means converting from one language to another, such as from English to Spanish. The most common type of transcription is from a spoken-language source into text, such as a computer file suitable for printing as a document, such as a report. Common examples are the proceedings of a court hearing such as a criminal trial (by a court reporter) or a physician's recorded voice notes (medical transcription).
Other types of transcription include the conversion of sign language or braille to text or vice versa. Transcription can also mean the conversion of a written source into another medium, such as by the optical scanning of books into digital versions that can be then be presented in other forms such as in electronic books or as speech. In a strict linguistic sense, transcription is the process of matching the sounds of human speech to special written symbols using a set of exact rules so that these sounds can be reproduced later.
Both transcription and common transliteration convert words or characters from one visual form into another. In order for a native English speaker, for example, to read Arabic (when the English speaker has no prior knowledge of Arabic), one or more Arabic words may be transliterated into phonetic equivalents (written in English characters). This, however, removes the original character set from the wording. Thus, a native speaker of Arabic (with no knowledge of English) would not be able to read the transliterated words.
It would be desirable to be able to generate words and, specifically, characters, which can be read by speakers of both a primary language and a secondary language. Thus, a method of generating a transliteration font solving the aforementioned problems is desired.